Apple's new cloud music service has been criticised by sections of the music industry for encouraging piracy by allowing people to essentially legitimise their pirated music collections.
Today Apple announced iCloud, which will allow people to store their songs, calendar entries and other files on Apple's servers and have this content readily accessible over the air on Apple devices including the iPhone and iPad.
But alongside it is a new tool called iTunes Match, which has been dubbed by some as a "music pirate amnesty" and others as a way of bringing pirates into the legal music store fold.
The $US24.95 a year service scans users' hard drives for music, including files obtained illegally, and matches them with the authorised tracks in Apple's iTunes library. It then makes a quality iTunes version of the tracks automatically accessible in the iCloud.
iTunes Match will initially be only available to US users but it is understood Apple is working on signing licences to enable it to launch in other territories.
Michael Speck, who ran the music industry's landmark court case against file sharing network Kazaa and is now working on technologies to reduce piracy, said Apple was "no better than the old p2p pirates".
"If you can store all your pirate content you won't need to buy content will you?" said Speck of iTunes Match.
"Let me put it this way: if you can legally park your stolen car in my garage will you rush out and actually pay for your own car?"
Speck dubbed the $US25 access fee for iTunes Match a "$25 fee for an alibi" and questioned whether that amount would be split fairly among the copyright owners.
"Putting aside that this means a 1000 song catalogue will only cost the pirate 2.5 cents a song, there is no way that Apple could fairly compensate the actual victims and still take its cut," he said.